Monday, August 11, 2008

I was investigating a starter website and noticed that it mentioned subsonic. Since third-party components can be tricky for implementation and security, I went to see what it was. Subsonic is an open source Data Access Layer. Someone has probably mentioned it to me before but it didn't register. The website has videos using subsonic which are great. Subsonic connects to the database and creates a DAL for a .Net project which uses intellisense for discovery. The only thing that worries me is that the connection isn't through SPs they create but they say they parse the SQL commands so that SQL injection isn't a problem. I also watched another video of theirs about their REST handler on their tips and tricks page. While I still like .NetTiers for my DAL (which requires a purchase of CodeSmith), I liked the easy of use and the fact that CodeSmith is not required. Just as I was grumbling to myself about a startersite for this, I found the link on the front page of their site for just that. It's a content management site that includes login, page generation, etc. The video cut out on me halfway through but I got the main idea and I liked it. I also noticed that the video mentioned FCKeditor which I hadn't heard of before.

I like this stuff but will probably use it for my own admin pages. It's not that the product is bad but I want to go through generated sp's and I like that .NetTiers gives me an admin site and web service. .NetTiers is also a layer I know who to code to and go farther with in terms of specificity and inheritance. But I really like this subsonic stuff.